Fieldnotes #04
Mentoring sessions, some React performance detective work, and a surprisingly productive Friday.
Double digits! Weeknotes #10. I did not think I’d make it this far when I started these.
Work
Two mentoring sessions this week — one with a junior dev who’s just discovering accessibility (always a joy), one with a mid-level who’s navigating the transition to more technical leadership. Both conversations reminded me how much I enjoy this part of the job.
Got pulled into some React performance investigation on one of our product teams. The culprit was the classic: an expensive calculation happening on every render with no memoisation, inside a component that re-rendered frequently. useMemo fixed it in ten minutes. Finding it took two hours. That’s just the job sometimes.
The surprisingly productive Friday
Fridays in December can go either way — sometimes they’re a write-off, sometimes you find a pocket of quiet focus. This was the latter. Knocked out a backlog of code review, wrote up some design token documentation, and left feeling like a functional adult.
Reading
Started The Art of Leadership by Michael Lopp. Three chapters in and it’s very good. Recommended if you’re moving into or currently in a leadership role.